Sweetgum: Embedded Mysteries of a Tree and Its Rare Paneling

A tree can be many things for many people: beautiful or a nuisance, its wood low-grade or its grain profound. A sweetgum tree is all these things for me. This post will give you a tour through sweetgum's beauties and annoyances, including its surprising use as high-end wood paneling in the 1920s and 30s.

First, regard the beauty. What other tree offers such a panoply of colors in the fall? Yellows, reds, purples, orange--sweetgum does it all. True, those powerful colors are only generated by trees that receive adequate sunlight, but there is some wonderful, creative chemistry going on there. Carotenes, xanthophylls, anthocyanins--these are the words that exercise the tongue while stirring curiosity about the possible purpose behind all that color.

There was a time in my life, during my extended undergraduate career, when I acquired a fascination with chemistry, specifically organic chemistry--the chemistry of carbon, the element upon which life is built. While premeds labored through the lectures with high anxiety for the grade they might receive, I was there with a love of subject and a hunger for knowledge.

In decades since, and not talking about premeds here, I've noticed that people who are disconnected from nature tend to be intimidated by nature's complexity. In order to feel comfortable, they surround themselves with a simplified, static nature of mowed lawn and trimmed shrubs. But for those of us who love nature, its complexity is appealing--a richness that rewards endless inquiry and exploration. I remember a bus ride through New England long ago, looking out the window and thrilling at the thought of all the chemistry going on in the forested hillsides we were passing by. 

At the same time, it's hard not to be annoyed by the sweetgum's "gum balls" scattered on the ground, prickly and destabilizing underfoot.

Overabundance, too, can turn affection into surfeit. In the piedmont, stretching from central New Jersey down through North Carolina, sweetgum sprouts like a weed in areas we seek to maintain as meadows. Managing remnant piedmont prairies at Penny's Bend in Durham, NC, required mowing or prescribed burns to keep the rampant growth of sweetgum seedlings from smothering rare wildflowers. Grasslands in NJ often require similar intervention.

At least near water, one natural check on sweetgum's rampancy is beavers, who apparently love them for their inner bark laden with sweet gum--the liquid amber found in its latin name, Liquidambar styraciflua. This photo was taken during a walk at Plainsboro Preserve ten years ago. The beavers' preference was so strong, and the sweetgums so numerous, that we saw no other species of tree being chewed upon.

The vexing ubiquity in early succession that I've encountered in the eastern piedmont contrasts strikingly with my experience with sweetgum years prior in Ann Arbor, MI. Being a more southern species, the tree's native range doesn't extend into Michigan, so it's no surprise that a horticultural colleague at the University of Michigan proudly planted a sweetgum as something rare and wonderful, with its fall color and craggy winged stems. 

The sweetgum's wood, too, generates conflicting impressions. It rots quickly if left on the ground, is hard to split, and proves insubstantial as firewood. 

And yet, fifty years ago, my family moved into a beautiful house in Ann Arbor that was paneled in the most appealing way with sweetgum. The wood had a rich, warm glow--clearly a winner for paneling, but I have not knowingly encountered it since.

Then in 2023, we discovered a piece of wood from a packing crate bearing the name Demarest and Co on a wall inside the Veblen House. While researching the Demarest name, I came across an article about American Gumwood. In 1926, the Bureau of the Hardwood Manufacturer's Institute in Memphis, TN was promoting its new booklet: Beautiful American Gumwood: A superb native hardwood for interior woodwork and furniture.  

It took awhile to figure out that they were talking about sweetgum, not another eastern native called black gum. As a friend pointed out, calling sweetgum "gumwood" also risks confusion with the eucalyptus native to Australia, known as gum tree.

The pamphlet begins by describing America's great forests as being our destiny to harvest:

The story of American gum wood dates back many centuries. Nature requires many years of favorable growth to produce a masterpiece, and in the vast stretches of our southland forests, extending from the Atlantic to the Mississippi valley and beyond, the quiet work of building cell and fibre was going on long before DeSoto and his valiant men first beheld in wonder the mighty "Father of Waters." What a marvel of creation, when from soil, moisture, and sunshine this fine wood came into being, now to be transformed by the hand of man into products that contribute to his well being and enjoyment.

By the mid-1920s, apparently, that enthusiastic harvest had led to more preferred species growing scarce:

Lumbermen have long known gumwood, yet vast tracts have been left standing while other interspersed hardwoods of widely varying species which happened to be wanted at the time, have been cut out. 

Overlooked in the past, sweetgum now stood ripe for the taking.

The tree itself, as it displays its lofty and graceful symmetry, is one of the glories of our native forests. Its sturdy proportions are enhanced by masses of scarlet, orange, and yellow leaves, which change, as the summer wanes. In size, it is heroic; one hundred feet to one hundred fifty feet in height, with a diameter of four or five feet, is not unusual. And some idea of the extent of growth of this important tree may be gained from the fact that with the exception of the oaks, gumwood exceeds all other hardwoods.

If sweetgums could read, they might have felt deeply flattered, but also be wondering if their tombstones were being readied and inscribed. And yet, one cannot be fully dismissive towards tree harvest--we who live in wooden houses and keep ourselves warm through the winter with fossil fuels rather than renewable energy from wood. 

This photo in the pamphlet looks reminiscent of the warm glow of the paneling I experienced fifty years ago, but doesn't capture the complexity and variety of mysteriously generated grains that sweetgum is capable of.

As the pamphlet explains:

Now no wood has more wonderfully interesting patterns than figured gumwood, but it is one of Nature's riddles to account for them. The pattern is not produced in the usual manner by quarter-sawing, although this process will improve any figure if it is already there. All one can say is that some trees have pronounced figured wood, others varying degrees of pattern, and many which show but slight indications of it. Undoubtedly the condition of the soil and the location of the individual tree affect in some mysterious way the structure of the wood. Only when the tree is felled, does the grain show itself as plain or figured. That is what makes the gumwood tree so interesting; it is like finding a }ewel, the value of which depends upon hidden qualities brought out by cutting and polishing.

The quizzled, tangled grain that makes sweetgum hard to split can bedazzle when milled.

The figure ramifies through the wood at random, obeying no known laws. Gumwood logs will each display differing patterns, some subdued, some intricate and ornate.

Go forth, then, dear readers, and if you happen upon a sweetgum along a trail at Herrontown Woods or elsewhere in Princeton, big yet not as big as the virgin timbers the pamphlet describes, know that you are gazing upon a mystery of creation, whose creative chemistry is not yet fully understood, and whose sometimes plain, sometimes profound grain is impossible to predict from one tree to another.

There's one more passage in the pamphlet that helped me understand why my family home in Ann Arbor was paneled with sweetgum. The 1926 pamphlet may have influenced the couple who built the house in 1933, but they may also have encountered the paneling during their many travels in Europe. The pamphlet explains:

Europe has long recognized the exquisite beauty and texture of American gumwood. In fact, England, France, Italy, Spain, and other countries were first to recognize its fine working qualities. In America, however, its light was for a time hid under a bushel, so far as public acquaintance with its true worth is concerned. But now, due to growing appreciation of its merit, the valuable products of the gumwood tree stand forth proudly as "American gumwood,'* nothing else -so named, and so prized. The old adage, "a prophet is not without honor, save in his own country," no longer applies, if we may adjust this metaphor to a tree.